Ten Things You Need to Know Today: 2 September 2022

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1. Biden takes aim at Maga
2. Treasury compiling options for Truss
3. Man tries to assassinate Argentine vice-president
4. Starmer more popular than Tory hopefuls
5. Boy dies after joining TikTok craze
6. New monkeypox strain found
7. England had joint warmest summer
8. PM’s jet used for ‘boozy jolly’
9. Gun crime rises outside London
10. Truss will appoint Case to ‘bridge gap’

published 2 September 2022

1. Biden takes aim at Maga

Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again (Maga) movement is a threat to democracy, Joe Biden has said. “Maga forces are determined to take this country backwards,” said the US president in a primetime speech in Pennsylvania. “They live not in the light of truth but in the shadow of lies,” he added. Biden painted a “dark portrait of his political opponents,” said CNN, accusing Trump and his followers of threatening the entire American experiment. The leading Republican, Kevin McCarthy, said the president “has chosen to divide, demean, and disparage his fellow Americans”.

The Treasury is working on a series of options to counter the cost of living crisis, with an emergency mini-budget due to be presented within two weeks if Liz Truss replaces Boris Johnson as PM. Meanwhile, a draft letter from Energy UK, the industry association, has called for deficit funding for suppliers, the scrapping of VAT from bills and Covid-style exemptions and reliefs from business rates. However, said The i paper, a deficit funding scheme is likely to cost up to £100bn over three years.

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A man has been arrested after attempting to shoot Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Argentina’s vice-president, at point blank range outside her home in Buenos Aires. De Kirchner was greeting supporters when a man emerged from the crowd and pointed a handgun in her face. President Alberto Fernandez said the gun was loaded with five bullets but failed to fire when triggered. He added that the attempt on De Kirchner’s life was one of the “most serious” incidents since the country returned to democracy in 1983.

Voters think Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer would make a better PM than either Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak, according to a poll. As the Tory leadership contest draws to a close, voters put Starmer four points ahead of Truss, with 39% backing him against 35% supporting her. The Labour leader came eight points ahead of Rishi Sunak. The polling of 1,500 voters was carried out by Redfield & Wilton Strategies on behalf of The i paper.

A mother has spoken of how her teenage son died performing a TikTok choking challenge as his friends watched online. Lauryn Keating said her son Leon Brown, 14, of Cumbernauld, Lanarkshire, was found unresponsive in his room after allegedly performing the “Blackout challenge”, which encourages people to restrict their breathing until they fall unconscious. It was same dangerous craze that caused Archie Battersbee to suffer a serious brain injury and led to his death. Keating said her son and his friends “probably thought it was a laugh and a joke”.

UK health officials have announced that a new strain of monkeypox has been identified. The UK Health Security Agency said that a person who had recently been to West Africa had contracted a genetically distinct variant of the virus. Contact tracing is being carried out to determine if there are further infections after the individual was moved to the Royal Liverpool University Hospital. There are now at least 3,279 known cases of monkeypox in the UK, with 79 identified in the last week - down from 126 the week before.

The prime minister’s official jet was used for a “boozy jolly” by civil servants, said The Sun. A number of officials reportedly joined the 91-minute journey over the UK, which reportedly cost £50,000, during which a “fancy meal with a selection of alcoholic drinks” was served. Labour’s shadow trade secretary Emily Thornberry said: “This would be utterly disgraceful behaviour at the best of times, but in the middle of our country's current crisis, it is shameful beyond words.”

Some 29 out of 43 police forces have seen an increase in gun crime over the past 10 years and in eight of these it has more than doubled. According to analysis of Home Office data by The Guardian, two in three police force areas in England and Wales are experiencing rising gun crime, with one force facing levels six times higher than a decade ago. However, London has halved its gun crime over the past decade, partly due to measures such as Operation Trident, the Met’s gun and gang crime unit.

The man who acted as Boris Johnson’s Foreign Office press secretary will be appointed a “top spinner” for Liz Truss if she wins the leadership election, said The Guardian. The job of No 10 director of communications will be split in two, with Simon McGee taking on a civil service role and Truss’s current senior media adviser, Adam Jones, in charge of the political side of the operation. A Tory source said Truss “lacks Boris’s emotional connectivity and gut instinct,” so “she needs somebody who can help her bridge that gap”.

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